Digressions&Impressionstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-1185191676405081722017-07-19T18:39:37+02:00TypePadAn Ethical Argument for Philosophy Co-Authorship; on Friendship and Disagreementtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401b7c90d36d9970b2017-07-19T18:39:37+02:002017-07-19T18:50:04+02:00[This piece was co-written with and co-published with Joshua Miller [here]--ES] The most dazzling example of co-authorship is Paul Erdős, who co-wrote more than 1400 papers in mathematics with 485 collaborators. (What is your Erdős number?) To do this, he became functionally homeless: "His modus operandi was to show up...Eric Schliesser

In the sciences, co-authorship is normal. In the humanities, it is uncommon. In philosophy, it is almost non-existent. (See chart.)* Yet philosophy is not without famous co-authors (e.g., Marx and Engels). What's more, some monographs ought properly be considered co-authored, like John Stuart Mill's collaborations with Harriet Taylor Mill: "when two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common it is of little consequence, in respect of the question of originality, which of them holds the pen."

Co-authorship in the sciences is ideally ruled by two rules rooted in a particular sociology of labs and research groups. First, co-authors contribute to the scholarly endeavor for a piece of publishable scholarship by planning, executing, or analyzing the results of some sort of research. Second, co-authors compose the written portion of the research, either collectively or through some division of labor.

Both of these ideals are violated, of course—there are plenty of massive multi-authored articles where scholars receive token authorship (gift authorship) or someone who made substantial contributions is not credited as an author (ghost authorship.) In that way, these are "endorsed" norms, not the "enforced" ones: violations abound and are even legitimated as common practice in some "big science" research areas. But this remains the practical ideal.

2. Why is co-authorship deprecated in philosophy?

Professional philosophers collaborate, usually through disputatious conversation, but usually not in a way that counts multiple thinkers as the author of a single paper. We are also much less likely to cite our peers than the agenda-setting papers in our sub-fields, especially as a part of a generic literature review. (See Kieran Healey's data.) It is more common for close collaborators to co-edit than to co-author: for instance, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum famously created the "capabilities approach" together without co-authoring any of their foundational papers. They did, however, co-edit the seminal volume, The Quality of Life in 1993.

So while we do not imagine ourselves to be lone geniuses communing with the ancient canon, it is the case that many philosophical papers are projected as manifestos of a single principled thinker. Indeed, philosophers are particularly prone to a kind of "subauthorial collaboration" that is formalized in lavish acknowledgements in the text or an early footnote. (Cronin, Shaw, La Barre, 2003)

"This paper mostly presents the latest lessons I've learned from my students. Under the customs of the natural sciences, it should have been a joint paper, the coauthors being (in alphabetical order) John Collins, Ned Hall, myself [David Lewis], L.A. Paul, and Jonathan Schaffer. But under the customs of philosophy, a paper is expected to be not only a report of discoveries but a manifesto; and, happily, the five of us have by no means agreed upon a common party line."**

Yet analytic philosophers often imagine themselves by analogy to the natural and social sciences, and American and continental philosophers increasingly emphasize the collaborative nature of our enterprise. Why, then, do we not use co-authorship more?

One obvious reason is the relative paucity of grants and research support compared to the natural and social sciences. Without an incentive to adopt the lab or research group model, most working philosophers are not members of a funded research unit with reporting requirements. Rigorous research is understood to support 'research-led teaching,' and so the single-author model is based primarily on the single-teacher model. We should thus expect the introduction of larger private grant-making institutions, like the Templeton Foundation and the Berggruen Institute, and public European grant agencies, to usher in an era of increasing research group size in philosophy, and the more frequent co-authorship.

We expect that new collaborative technologies will decrease the costs and difficulties of collaboration to the extent that philosophers will more often overcome them, even without any increased funding or benefits. Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, and simple Microsoft Office sharing, versioning, and commenting will all tend to ease the speed with which scholars of all varieties—including philosophers—create collaborative documents. Social media, chat programs, and email ease collaboration over distance to replicate the proximity by which labs and research groups co-compose.

Lastly, we might think of philosophical research as long-shot bets (Langhe and Schliesser, 2017) that explore concepts, methods, or techniques that may be generally applicable. As such, it will be difficult to trace any particular result in the world back to a paper or monograph, and it is preferable to have many such long-shot bets rather than focus the efforts and attention of a highly skilled research team on sequential elaboration of just one of these gambles. It will generally be better to encourage idiosyncratic work done by individuals and small teams in hopes that one of those bets pays off. In the age of increasingly easy collaboration some enduring, virtual small research teams will emerge without, hopefully, fully displacing lone wolfs and disputatious research groups.

3.What norms of co-authorship might philosophers embrace?

If philosophers do adopt co-authorship norms, which ones should we adopt?

We should start with the ideal of recognition of actual contribution to the research and knowing participation in the composition. Co-authorship should never be merely "honorary" inclusion for a member of a team or department who contributed to neither the research work nor the writing endeavor. However, the division of labor in some disciplines has the result of producing co-authored pieces where some credited contributors don't even understand the paper they have helped to produce. Should we extend co-authorship to a student assistant who writes the literature review for a piece of research without understanding the rest of the paper? Should we accept co-authorship for a paper whose conclusions we do not endorse, if we supplied the formal modeling or computer code that underwrites it?

Our current professional ideal is consensus. On this ideal all authors must give credence to every jot and tittle of the work, even if their confidence varies slightly. Co-authorship in philosophy is stricter because philosophers can and should endorse all the claims, arguments, and conclusions of the paper. Papers can be thus be co-authored in philosophy when two or more researchers find a common interest, discuss it at great length, and truly co-compose the entire paper, contesting each argumentative move and turn of phrase until agreement is reached. As such, it should be very unlikely to see large groups of co-authors writing together, given the difficulty of producing such an exacting meeting of the minds, and we even look askance at philosophy papers co-authored by three or four scholars.

Another possibility is that philosophers working on closely-related research might try to divvy up the tasks in a field of research around some question such that only one or a few of the authors of a work understand the whole thing, while others are credited for their contributions without being "first" or "lead" author status. This requires trust in each other to handle sections of the paper that address relevant issues from their sub-fields; perhaps a paper that is 12,000 words long is written in two halves, with only the introduction and conclusion truly a joint project. On this ideal, co-authors retain to right to veto truly abhorrent claims made outside of their assigned sections, but only by threatening to dissolve the partnership. Otherwise, they can only register objections and hope to be heard.

A third possibility would be to follow the norm in law courts, where empaneled and en banc judges issue both dissenting opinions or in some cases join the majority in parts of their decision but not others, perhaps affirming the result but not all of the methods used to arrive at it. In such cases, a minority might dissent vehemently, while the court is understood to have rendered the opposite verdict: that minority dissent is clearly a separate research project in philosophical terms. They are not understood as co-authors of the majority opinion but as co-authors of a distinct opinion which did not win a majority of support. The more instructive question is what to do when judges affirm parts of the main decision but not all of it, and by analogy, situations where co-authors affirm parts of a research project but not all of it. Can it be possible for one of the co-authors to "sign on" to parts 1, 2, and 4 of a paper, while dissenting from arguments found in part 3 and in the conclusion? For example, in the past one of us has used a footnote to signal an alternative position from the one arrived at in the body of the paper.

A fourth possibility is majority voting. Bright, Dang, and Heesen (2017) argue that scientific work should aggregate researchers' judgments. Claims and propositions should be made in a paper that receive the assent of the majority of the authors. One might well find oneself outvoted in some cases, and this would be fine so long as there was agreement that voting had not produced a contradictory or logically incoherent set of claims.

A fifth possibility would be a kind of deliberative dictatorship: a lead author could write a paper, assign sections for others to compose, and bounce ideas off of possible co-authors. At the conclusion, all participants who agreed with the final product could sign on as co-authors, while dissenters could produce their own dissenting papers to be published alongside. This is related to proposals that might allow peer reviewers to receive more recognition for their work as initial gatekeepers.

Could all of these modes of co-authorship flourish in philosophy? Are some of them inimical to the discipline?

4. Philosophers should co-author more of our work

Given the fact that some forms of collaborative recognition do exist, why suggest co-authorship as an alternative model for philosophy? Let's start by dividing the reasons for co-authorship into roughly epistemic and roughly ethical categories, even if this is a division that is easily collapsed. Co-authored papers may simply be better for having multiple composers, readers, and researchers attached to them. The division of epistemic labor will often lead to better-written, more carefully crafted, or simply more copious publications: many minds make light work.

At the same time, co-authorship is partly about recognizing the contributions of our peers. In that sense, it is ethical. This is a weaker defense of co-authorship, since there are alternative methods for providing recognition. If a paper issues from a conversation with a colleague or a good objection raised at a conference or blog post, we philosophers would normally expect to mention that in a footnote, not to grant the colleague or objector co-authorship status. Philosophy papers are sometimes imagined to be the record of the thoughts or analysis of a single agent, and group agency seems much more difficult in these cases because we are so rarely in anything resembling agreement. We are rarely of a single mind, ourselves, so this is no big impediment, but this also ignores the fact that one can commit to a written product while having varying confidence in its disparate elements.

But there's a significant ethical claim that might recommend co-authorship: the ideal of scholarly friendship. Co-authorship can be a way to channel professional philosophical relationships in productive ways, a norm for guiding conversations and arguments towards shared, potentially overlapping projects. There is independent reason to believe that shared projects are an intrinsic good tied closely to well-being. (Korsgaard, 1992) Thus we should, if possible, prefer to share the tasks associated with philosophical research with others, not just after publication but throughout the scholarly endeavor. Philosophical co-authorship is desirable just because philosophical friendship is desirable.

Shared projects are possible both between equals and between mentors and students. As such, co-authorship is a way to encourage productive collaboration within departments and with undergraduate and graduate students. In the pedagogy-first model of much philosophical research, departmental colleagues at most small schools should not co-author their research because this leads to overlapping areas of interest and knowledge. A department with only a handful of philosophers should instead hope that its faculty have as little in common as possible, even if they must share governance of their department and spend their careers working side-by-side. But if co-authorship underwrites philosophical friendship, then even a maximally pluralistic department should seek opportunities to co-create research, actively seeking agreement and shared methods, research areas, and conceptual terrain.

Like friends, co-authors need not agree on everything.*** Finding some method for adjudicating those disagreements is important, but philosophical writing can encompass these minor dissents or majoritarian procedures, just as our departments do. The key is that the commitment to co-author—like the commitments of friendship—is a commitment to resolve disagreements using whatever methods are available. Friends do not obsess over decision-procedures, though we adopt them to ease tensions for the sake of shared projects. The same should go for co-authors.

Like friends, co-authors need not be equals. We see in the sciences that co-authorship allows a kind of scholarly mentorship, and in philosophy graduate students first experience intense collaboration for the first time while writing their dissertation with a senior scholar. We even acknowledge that this is akin to co-authorship by treating dissertation advising as something close to co-authorship for some professional purposes.

More of this sort of mentorship should be encouraged. The practice of learning from another scholar does not end when a philosopher receives a PhD, and probably we shouldn't pretend that it does. Perhaps newly-minted PhDs aren't yet ready for the full burdens of a research program, or perhaps they would benefit from mentorship when they move on to a new research program. Or perhaps not: perhaps this would end with more domination by senior scholars, as the division of labor creates permanent hierarchies. But it's not as if our current, academic political economy is hierarchy-free.

A final reason is merely accuracy: our authorial norms give a false idea of our practices to the rest of the academy. We should consider revising them to align ourselves with our fellow academics. Let's not pretend that scholarly productivity metrics are irrelevant or that Deans do not look askance at our publication records compared to other disciplines.

*** We are indebted to Andrew Corsa's and Eric Schliesser's unpublished research on Margaret Fuller's ideas on friendship and magnanimity.

On Benevolent Despots; or what philosophers can learn from the foundations of Public Choicetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401bb09ae2f1e970d2017-07-12T16:32:36+02:002017-07-12T18:27:46+02:00One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen, buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library. Only the immediate post-dissertation leisure of an academic novice allowed for the browsing that produced my own...Eric Schliesser

One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen, buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library. Only the immediate post-dissertation leisure of an academic novice allowed for the browsing that produced my own dramatic example of learning by serendipity. Wicksell's new principle of justice in taxation gave me a tremendous surge of self-confidence. Wicksell, who was an established figure in the history of economic ideas, challenged the orthodoxy of public finance theory along lines that were congenial with my own developing stream of critical consciousness. From that moment in Chicago, I took on the determination to make Wicksell's contribution known to a wider audience, and I commenced immediately a translation effort that took some time and considerable help from Elizabeth Henderson, before final publication.

Stripped to its essentials, Wicksell's message was clear, elementary, and self-evident. Economists should cease proffering policy advice as if they were employed by a benevolent despot, and they should look to the structure within which political decisions are made. Armed with Wicksell, I, too, could dare to challenge the still-dominant orthodoxy in public finance and welfare economics. In a preliminary paper, I called upon my fellow economists to postulate some model of the state, of politics, before proceeding to analyse the effects of alternative policy measures. I urged economists to look at the "constitution of economic polity," to examine the rules, the constraints within which political agents act. Like Wicksell, my purpose was ultimately normative rather than antiseptically scientific. I sought to make economic sense out of the relationship between the individual and the state before proceeding to advance policy nostrums.

Wicksell deserves the designation as the most important precursor of modern public-choice theory because we find, in his 1896 dissertation, all three of the constitutive elements that provide the foundations of this theory: methodological individualism, homo economicus, and politics-as-exchange. I shall discuss these elements of analytical structure in the sections that follow. In Section V, I integrate these elements in a theory of economic policy. This theory is consistent with, builds upon, and systematically extends the traditionally accepted principles of Western liberal societies. The implied approach to institutional-constitutional reform continues, however, to be stubbornly resisted almost a century after Wicksell's seminal efforts. The individual's relation to the state is, of course, the central subject matter of political philosophy. Any effort by economists to shed light on this relationship must be placed within this more comprehensive realm of discourse.---James Buchanan ("1986 Nobel Lecture") The Constitution of Economic Policy

l have quoted the first three paragraphs of Buchanan's Nobel lecture. In what follows I focus on the second paragraph. So, let me just say about the first paragraph that while there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the charming opening vignette nor the significance of Wicksell to the history of public-choice theory, one can also recognize in it Buchanan's rhetorical and political savvy to know that his Swedish audience will be pleased by the praise for their compatriot (himself an important influence on Swedish economics). Buchanan's sometime collaborator, Gordon Tullock (who gets a mention in the lecture), was notably absent from that stage and was not known to exhibit such savvy. One may even say that it is consistent with the best insights of public-choice (and Tullock deserves praise for this [recall]) that opportune expressions of praise are, alas, an ineleminable part of the politics of academic recognition and credit.

In addition, Buchanan signals the importance of leisure and serendipity, which is the loveliest consequence of life's uncertainty. I go beyond the text by suggesting that the conditions that make serendipity possible are leisure, a scarce resource itself rooted in structural features of a political economy, and well-prepared minds--it's not just anybody that wanders around the old Harper library.

Okay, let's turn to the second paragraph. Buchanan is clear that his is a normative project. And while there is plenty to criticize in public choice with the tools of philosophy, what philosophers can learn from his project has not been fully assimilated. For I think his claims here can be decoupled from his commitment to "methodological individualism, homo economicus, and politics-as-exchange." What follows is a bit abstract and, for the sake of brevity, non-polemical (so without some juicy examples). I rewrite the key claims here as follows:

Philosophers should cease proffering policy and normative advice as if they were employed by a benevolent despot,+

When philosophers offer policy and normative guidance we should look to the structure within which political and normative decisions are made.

That is, too much policy-relevant, and ethically salient, philosophy assumes that the conditions under which the uptake of our ideas takes place is irrelevant. This is so despite the very sophisticated traditions of theorizing about the context-sensitivity of assertion (e.g., De Rose). Obviously, the previous sentence is an exaggeration in two senses: first, philosophers are (recall) increasingly willing to apply, reflexively, ideas about inductive risk (Douglas), epistemic injustice (Fricker), and epistemic violence (Dotson) to the norms and institutions of philosophy itself. Second, philosophers have become very interested in non-ideal theorizing as is evidenced by the interest in, say, feasibility constraints (I link to Brennan's work because Brennan himself is influenced by public choice). But non-ideal theory is, as of yet (correct me if I am wrong), not yet context-specific theorizing.

The last sentence of the previous paragraph may generate anxiety about relativism. A lot of my philosophical friends want to make general or invariant claims. While I do not share such anxiety, I think we can tame the anxiety if we follow a version of the third key claim:

Philosophers should explicitly postulate and model the state/politics, before proceeding to propose measures.

That is, we should analyze and make explicit the political and social conditions under which we speak as normative and theoretical authorities and model the possible uptake of our proposals. For, by doing this we do not undermine the validity of our claims; rather we allow these to be progressively adapted, if necessary, to further salient conditions. That is, by engaging in this modeling exercise we became adept at recognizing and making explicit the factors that are salient to our practices. This last can then feedback into a process of mutual criticism and learning and so make our theorizing less fragile to hidden assumptions.

Of course, the proposed modeling exercise is not needed if we only speak to each other, or if we don't care about what our words do.

* To what degree "methodological individualism, homo economicus, and politics-as-exchange" are "consistent" with the traditionally accepted principles of Western liberal societies is a question I skip today.

+ In 1986 Buchanan's language of 'benevolent despot' may well be taken as a nod to the controversy surrounding Milton Friedman's 1976 Nobel lecture (and Friedman's trip to Chile, and the relationship(s) between Pinochet and the Chicago Boys.) But Buchanan used the phrase throughout his career (see, e.g., this piece from 1962). That is to say, public choice was methodologically self-aware of the risks inherent in treating economics as a political engineering enterprise.

On The Lack of Public Intellectuals among Academicstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401b7c90a4142970b2017-07-10T12:58:38+02:002017-07-10T13:02:57+02:00SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates. The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be...Eric Schliesser

SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.

The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.

“All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public,” notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation.'--Nicholas Kristof (feb 15, 2014) The New York Times.

Periodically the New York Times reflects on the lack of public intellectuals among academics today (see also here; and here; here, etc.). I ignore to what degree the true public intellectual is ever an academic (yes, I have heard of Habermas). When one reads through the pieces the Times devotes to the issue, academics are castigated for a recurring list of ills: esoteric specialization and professionalization, writing in inaccessible, turgid prose, and lack of relevance. Sometimes, too, it's noted that society may be anti-intellectual. But the pieces never note that the main reason for the decline of the public intellectual is The New York Times (and its sibling mainstream media) itself.* And by this I do not mean, leaving aside the few columns of true news reporting, the fact that its pages primarily seem to be devoted to documenting the life-styles and passing thoughts of the wealthy and famous.

First, the definition of news/newsy that newspapers use is the central obstacle to the participation of intellectuals in the public sphere. News is (a) that which dominates the headlines in the latest 24hrs cycle; (b) what the editor thinks it is. (It's possible that (a) is conceptually and temporarily prior to (b).) This means that rapid responsiveness is the central quality any would be-public intellectual must possess. Now (as Twitter reveals) plenty of smart people are good at fast thinking and, with practice, fast writing. So, rapidity is not the main problem, although the focus on news does screen out thoughts that may have to germinate. Rather, the main problem with the focus on news is that only news-responsiveness is worth publishing. This means that any space for public intellectuals is essentially reactive.

This last point entails that nearly all intellectual work that appears in print is opportunistic. That it is opportunistic is clear from the fact that the stuff that makes it in print recycles (policy/conceptual) stances that were known prior to publication (or promote their forthcoming books): any problem X can be solved by a fairly narrowly constrained list Y, including more markets, better families, less pollution, more racial awareness, more education, more surveillance powers to the state, less democracy, more conservatives in higher education, and, of course, less academic specialization, etc.

Second, and related, because one has to be responsive to the news-cycle, the public intellectual has to be policy-prescriptive. News means there is an urgent problem. Urgent problems require decisive solutions; they do not leave much room for critical analysis, for strategic, long-term thinking, for the weighing of evidence in the service of multiple scenarios, for the diagnoses of underlying symptoms, etc. Newspapers and media don't want to give space to unprovoked-by-news editorials explaining the limitations of existing policy, the likely downside risks short of the apocalypse of the status quo, or some interesting fact about the culture that remains interesting eighteen months from now. So, the would be public intellectual must have a nose for news, be either over-confident in her solutions or alarmist (or both). Undoubtedly, that makes for great entertainment. By contrast, a public intellectual culture requires a willingness to return to topics and themes ahead of the news. Newspapers cultivate such a culture for a reading public, or it does not exist.

Third, the (for profit) mass media are chasing the lowest-common-denominator-eye-balls. In practice, this means that pieces have to be short (between 550-800 words) even though, with the migration to online, space is really not a consideration anymore. This entails that between the first paragraph hook and the forceful conclusion, there is barely any space for analysis, argument, and evidence that might support either. In addition, the permitted vocabulary and sentence structure are appropriate to high school level. (Yes, I need to give you something to quote.) That politicians may speak at fifth or sixth grade level may be smart politics. That newspapers are increasingly following their example is a major barrier to public intellectual life. As Kristof's passage reveals, subordinate clauses get eliminated, and single sentence paragraphs become the norm.

The previous paragraph should not be confused with questions about readability. Love and respect copy-editors. They greatly improve any work that comes their way (including the rejected ones). Simplicity of expression is not the enemy of complex thought.

Fourth, newspapers love controversy and traffic, and so become irresponsible in their-unwillingness to curate their comments section. As many have noted this means that writing for the public means exposing oneself to abuse and various threats, which, in turn, encourage others to send private threats. The lack of curation means that any topic will be hijacked by parties interested in promoting themselves or their causes. What self-respecing, would-be-public intellectual wants to be the mere (Malebrancheian) occasion for others to mouth off?

So, when the Times recycles the meme of the disappearing intellectual, ask it to look into the mirror or tweet this blog post (which is under 1000 words).

*Yes, I am familiar with efforts to improve the situation, but nearly always these involve creating areas of the paper that are apart from the main sections.

A Tale of Three Papers and One Journaltag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401b7c908e21c970b2017-07-05T14:00:18+02:002017-07-06T11:00:24+02:00[Trigger alert: this post is a peculiar academic form of #humblebrag.] Recently, two of my papers appeared: "Evaluating Philosophy as Exploratory Research" co-authored with Rogier de Langhe in Metaphilosophy and "The Certainty, Modality, and Grounding of Newton’s Laws" co-authored with Zvi Biener in The Monist. (The latter paper has its...Eric Schliesser

[Trigger alert: this post is a peculiar academic form of #humblebrag.]

The Bergamo conference was one of the most joyous intellectual experiences of my life: fantastic location, brilliant papers, biographical revelations (a true view behind the sciences, as it were), and terrific ambiance (including astounding food), all of this presided over by Guicciardini a first rate scholar and a magnanimous, gentle soul. Guicciardini is the leading scholar of Newton's mathematics and its reception. The Bergamo conference was not my first invited lecture, but it was the first time I shared an invited stage with many of the scholars I had admired as a graduate student on an all expenses paid ticket (etc.). I treated it as a kind of coming out party [I did not know the term imposter syndrome yet] and rather than presenting a standard work in HPS scholarship, I decided to present a methodological paper inspired by and critical of Stein's work on Newton. (I felt secure in taking this risk because my paper was invited to the special issue.) I felt my presentation was not a disaster--I got lots of critical questions throughout the workshop; at the time I fantasized about it as a breakthrough performance. Needless to say, I enjoyed the whole experience.

I was dumbfounded when my invited paper was rejected by The Monist. It never occurred to me that could happen to an invited paper there. Admittedly, the referee was very critical, but I could not see the point of many of the criticisms (which treated my paper not as a methodological manifesto but as a contribution to scholarship). It was impossible to address the referee's criticisms and still maintain the integrity of the paper.** I sent the paper to a then-new journal HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. There it was sent out to a excellent, albeit very critical, referees who raised a whole bunch of challenges (and also fruitfully insisted I engage with some of Ernan McMullin's work). Responding to these referees generated major improvements to the paper. I am very proud of the fact that Rose-Mary Sargent published it in the first issue of HOPOS. My only regret was that it appeared just after Ernan died, so I couldn't send it to him and elicit his reflections.

A few years later, by then I had become a prolific blogger, I got invited to contribute a special issue on 'Evaluating Philosophy' for, you guessed it, The Monist. I recruited Rogier to co-write it with me. Rogier was a post-doc and I figured it would help his career to have a 'top publication.'+ Moreover, I secretly hoped we would do some (agent-based) modeling in researching this paper (because Rogier had recruited me to join Complex Systems Institute in Ghent); due to time constraints that never happened, alas (and so I never became a formal philosopher. Rogier is the source behind the underlying model and if the model ever gets traction it should just be known as De Langhe-model. But I was pleased by our collaboration because (i) the model can be used to evaluate all kinds of research grant schemes and be made to apply to most scholarly disciplines [except the Arts and some of the Humanities]; (ii) within philosophy the model does not pick sides between analytic and continental philosophy (etc.); (iii) it gives the technocrats what they want without completely destroying the underlying practice.

As it happens, after we submitted our paper, I refereed at least one other paper for that special issue on 'Evaluating Philosophy.' But then silence. Eventually the editor of the special issue let me know that this issue of The Monist would be delayed due to lack of (high quality) submissions. Because Rogier needs publications to advance his career and we both wanted this paper to be discussed, we decided to submit the paper to another journal: Metaphilosophy. There our paper got caught up with their now well-publicized software problems. After much prodding on our part, and interminable delay, we were encouraged "to resend it," and they'd be "happy to begin the review." After an extremely speedy review process -- I seriously doubt it went to external reviewers -- it was accepted and for good measure, the editors of Metaphilosophy added: "This piece should generate much interest." No other editor has ever said that to me.

By now the reader should not be surprised by how elated I am to be published in The Monist, finally! Third time is charm. (Thank you Zvi and the editors of Volume 100, Issue 3, Angela Breitenbach & Michela Massimi, for making this possible.) And the story is really about cosmic kharma because the editors and the referees for the issue on "Laws of Nature: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives," provided us with outstanding comments and, thereby, improved the final product.***

All tales have morals, so here are mine: (a) if you can, have multiple papers under review so you are not hostage to the meshuggas of our profession; (b) don't assume a publication before it has appeared in print, really, sure things are not sure. (My favorite evidence for this claim is when referees rejected my own contribution to a special issue of Synthese I edited--a paper that has already generated quite a few citations.) (c) Referees are the unsung heroes of the profession. (d) And, for the record, I would be happy to submit a new paper 'Evaluating Philosophy' for that special issue of The Monist.

***Because of length considerations much valuable historical material was cut. I hope Zvi and I will be able to revisit the work some time before long.

On Being A Particular Scholar's Gate-Keepertag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401b7c90234ef970b2017-06-13T23:38:53+02:002017-06-13T23:44:06+02:00About a decade ago I refereed a paper which seemed familiar. I decided to check my archive (that is my email account), and I found a rather lengthy and what seemed (to me) generous referee report on an earlier version of the same, barely changed paper. I filed a second,...Eric Schliesser

About a decade ago I refereed a paper which seemed familiar. I decided to check my archive (that is my email account), and I found a rather lengthy and what seemed (to me) generous referee report on an earlier version of the same, barely changed paper. I filed a second, somewhat more curmudgeonly report (mostly cut and paste from the first one), but alerted the editor of the (second) journal that I had seen this paper before (with apologies I had not alerted him to it earlier in the stage). A few months later I was sent the same paper by a third journal. The paper was essentially unchanged from the earlier versions. I told the editor that it was pointless for me to referee it again because I had refereed the paper twice before and that in my opinion the author was not responsive to my criticism. The editor decided to send the paper to another referee.

At the time I had no idea who the author of the paper was, although I have to admit that I had developed a certain amount of irritation about him. In my imagination the author was a stubborn scholar immune to my helpful attempts to call attention to detailed evidence that undermined his position. I also thought of him as ungrateful because I had put in a lot of work to offer (splendid!) advice on the paper--work that would go unrewarded professionally and, now, unnoticed, too.

The case I describe occurred in history of philosophy--where most journals practice so-called double-blind or (in deference to my wife--an eye surgeon) double-masked review. By contrast, in some fields, say, economics and history of economics, when one is refereeing one nearly always knows the author's identity (so-called single-blind, etc.). This is pretty problematic, and perhaps I should stop reviewing for such journals. But here I ignore that it is problematic and what I can do about it. (Mea culpa: I have been pretty lethargic in protesting this state of affairs.) A while ago, I noticed that during the last half decade I was often being asked to review the work of particular young scholars, who were otherwise unknown to me. None of the cases involved anything like the situation described in the previous two paragraphs. (That is, I read the papers, write reports, and then the experience merges into the mush that is my professional life.) In some cases I hope I'll meet the young scholar in person one day because I was excited about their work.

Even so, I have started to wonder what it means that for some junior scholars (I can think of at least four), I am literally one of the referees on the vast majority of the refereed papers they have published. (That's an easy thing to check given that most young scholars have updated versions of their CV online.) Part of me thinks this can't be healthy for them (and the field). I am happy to be gate-keeper, but now I worry that my scholarly niches and complete strangers (whose careers are on the line) have been shaped by the idiosyncratic nature of my intellectual sensibilities. (Yes, I recognize that the self-image may be a delusion, but it's a better delusion than those that think of their own work as un-problematic mainstream or cutting edge.)

Now, journals have lots of ways of preventing over-reliance on particular referees. But they are somewhat powerless to prevent different editors of different journals of over-using the same referee for particular papers (absent a data-base which would likely undermine anonymity).* [In fact, some scholarly conglomerates now find ways to ensure that you review a paper again (by having their software ask you if you would be willing to review for a sister journal).] For, while it is not a coincidence that I get asked to review these papers, the particular journal editors may call on me rather rarely.

My current inclination is to decline requests to referee when I notice that I am a frequent referee for a particular, junior person. This stance, if it is more widely shared, may also encourage editors to think outside the box and draw on a wider range of referees. Having just written the previous two sentences, it occurs to me that such a stance may also make it harder for journals to find (willing) referees and, thereby, undermine the opportunities for professional advancement of the younger scholars and the wider circulation of their ideas (which hurts the cause of truth). So, now I am unsure about what to do. I welcome hearing what readers think.

Before I close this Digression, one final remark: I learned the identity of the stubborn and ungrateful author years later after the paper was published pretty much unchanged in the third journal. (I didn't look for the paper, but scholar.google brought it to my attention.) As it happens, by then I had many pleasant and stimulating interactions with the person at various conferences. Even so, I harbor a modest resentment and suspicion toward this person (now happily tenured) and I will not review any other papers by him if I can avoid it.

On Wanting To Be A Public Philosopher tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401bb09a34191970d2017-06-07T18:42:17+02:002017-06-08T11:46:32+02:00Do you actually want to? ...nobody should have to be a public philosopher. Although it can be valuable, it can also be risky, and it isn't suitable for every kind of philosopher or for every kind of philosophical work. If you are only here in response to external pressure in...Eric Schliesser

Do you actually want to?

...nobody should have to be a public philosopher. Although it can be valuable, it can also be risky, and it isn't suitable for every kind of philosopher or for every kind of philosophical work.

If you are only here in response to external pressure in this direction, and this is not something you're motivated to do for your own reasons, or for its own sake, IMO you're within your rights to resist that pressure citing the risks and/or the inappropriateness of this kind of work for your situation.

Be aware of the risks.

Online hate and abuse are disproportionately directed at women, POC, LGBTQ people and other groups who experience discrimination, but anyone can be targeted. There are psychological, emotional, legal, financial, and other risks involved in public-facing work. They are often unpredictable.

Hate and abuse do not only occur online, even if they begin there. If you become a public figure your personal safety may be put at risk through e.g. doxxing, stalking, and dangerous physical mail. Academics are typically easy to target as our work addresses and phone numbers are posted freely online by our universities and our physical office spaces are often accessible to anyone.

If you belong to a university or other institution, find out what support and protections they provide. If nothing (or too little) is available, you might want to suggest/request/demand that they do better. Especially if your institution, department, or funding agency is actively encouraging you to engage in the risky business of public scholarship, they should support and help you when you do.

Some colleagues, in philosophy and elsewhere in the academy, do not respect public-facing scholarship. Some will even view it as evidence that you've lost interest in—or failed at—"real" philosophy. This can be an issue in securing employment as well as for promotion, tenure, and other forms of assessment.

Even positive experiences in the public arena can be exhausting and unpredictable. For example, media interest tends to come in viral waves, the timing of which can depend on all kinds of factors beyond your control and won't respect your teaching schedule.

Have something to say.

It should be something you care enough about, and that enough people will want to hear, to make your efforts worthwhile. If you are going to make a serious investment of time, emotional energy, research funding, and other things into public work, you need to believe in your project and your message.

I started to do public-facing work in earnest when I started to research the philosophy of love. My work on the epistemology of arithmetic is no less important to me, but it isn't suitable for the same kind of public audience, and that's OK (see above).

Consider who you want to be in the public arena.

If you develop a public profile, you will almost certainly be judged both positively and negatively for pretty much anything you do. Under these circumstances, integrity is challenging but essential. I recommend thinking carefully in advance about your intended public image, persona, personal brand, or whatever you like to call it.

I created a list of features I would aim to embody in my public-facing self. You don't need to be that explicit about it, but it helps to have a sense of direction and personal ethics to maintain consistency as you build a platform and audience.

Think ahead about your preferences with respect to privacy, as well as those of people around you (such as family members, collaborators, and colleagues). Keep these conversations current—people and situations change.

Know that you will need different skill sets.

Philosophers trained in a typical contemporary philosophy PhD program are not trained to be public philosophers. Don't expect it to be easy to transfer what you already know into the public sphere. Although often ignored, trivialized, or disparaged, everything listed in Part 2 below is an achievement.

I warmly recommend Carrie Jenkins's post to would-be-public philosophers, their would-be-peers and evaluators, and people that love public philosophers (for whatever reason). The piece is full of important insights and suggestions (there is a lot more than I quoted above), and I would echo her focus on integrity (recall). In particular, I really like how she calls attention to the significance of advance planning. Importantly, Jenkins calls attention to the responsibilities of institutions, not the least universities and grant agencies, that encourage public philosophy, but often provide shamefully few resources to support colleagues that are being threatened or abused/harassed from various angles or become targets of political campaigns. (The previous sentence draws on my experiences of my departmental colleagues and myself.) In addition, Jenkins is right to call attention to the reputational risks of doing public philosophy. We do have a lot of colleagues who fail to respect public-facing scholarship, but use it, as she suggests, as a proxy for lack of philosophical ability.

I like how Jenkins speaks of "public-facing" work/scholarship. It is clear that she tries to make it symmetrical with, let's call it, peer-facing scholarship. She is right to emphasize that they draw on different skill sets, and that our professional training does not really prepare us for public-facing work. (Having said that, European universities and grant agencies are increasingly offering seminars to address some of the required skill set as part of graduate training.) Her underlying (tacit) model, however, is that of publicizing insights she developed through her peer-facing expertise. That is, for Jenkins some peer-facing expertise is suitable for development to a public audience (and some not). That is, this is really a matter of (to use European technocratic-speek) disseminating peer-evaluated research findings to a wide audience.

To be sure, Jenkins's model is compatible with skipping publication in peer-facing outlets (journals) and hybrid versions (publishing some material for fellow experts and other material only in public venues, but with expert-quality documentation available--Piketty did a version of this and, perhaps, also Jenkins in her work on love). But my point is that public philosophy so conceived has an implied directionally from peer-facing expertise to public-facing exposure. There is nothing wrong with this conception. But it is not the only possible conception of the genre (for more of my views on public philosophy, recall here,here on Dotson's service philosophy, and here on some blogging as public philosophy).

Before I get to to that, it is worth noting that even in Jenkins's model of public philosophy, the person, who is a philosopher, and who faces the public, may well change. Jenkins hints at this by calling attention to the many skills and new dispositions one acquires by doing public philosophy. Even leaving aside (due to opportunity costs) that one may not be able to participate with the same dedication and attention to peer-facing philosophy, one may become a different kind of philosopher entirely. Here the metaphor of face is not innocent; by professionally facing others, one also becomes -- go read your Levinas - part of their community. A public-facing orientation generates duties, loyalties, and obligations and these when taken serious, in turn, transform the person. I don't mean the previous sentence to be my last word on it (it's not the first), but as the Hypatiadebacle revealed (recall), research ethics are not fully developed within professional philosophy yet.

And this gets me to another possible conception of the genre. It is quite possible for public-facing philosophy to influence or displace peer-facing philosophy. (To give a standard example: Socrates undoubtedly talked quite a bit to Plato, one hopes, but quite possibly spent a lot more time talking to non-philosophers.) By this I mean that public-philosophy entails a receptivity toward the risk that one's peer-facing philosophy is not just influenced by one's engagements with public others, but, more importantly, shaped by one's public-facing activities. For example, and it's not my area of expertise, but it is my sense from reading Judith Butler that gender theory was shaped by (no doubt, theory-mediated) encounters with lived experience that in certain respects ran well in advance of gender theory. (Some such analogous transformative experience occurred to me through my engagements with professional economists--I didn't go native [despite being employed in a social science department], but I look very differently at my own profession and its history now. I am confident plenty of philosophers of mind, say, were changed by their immersion in some of the cognitive sciences.)

The way such public-facing work can shape peer-faced work is unpredictable. Some will start muttering about lowered standards and lack of seriousness--and, indeed, there are genuine risks. But the would-be-shaping of peer-faced scholarship is, in fact, a central argument in favor of public-facing work. As I have noted before, analytical philosophy has low barriers to entry and little in the way of doctrinal or even (much) methodological expertise. At its best, it has a sponge-like capacity to constantly rejuvenate itself -- some would say be disciplined -- by way of outward engagement with mathematics, the other sciences, history, and even the arts, etc. There is no reason to end rejuvenation by way of facing-other-expert-areas. But, in addition, if we are being encouraged to face and transform the public, we should not be afraid to be transformed by it.

On the Training of Philosophers in Formal Methodstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401bb09a0df7f970d2017-05-31T21:39:03+02:002017-06-01T00:07:27+02:00Back when I was in graduate school, all students were required to take a course in logic. People had a vague understanding that there were also various other formal methods that used in philosophy – probability theory, decision theory, game theory, statistics – but courses in those topics did not...Eric Schliesser

Back when I was in graduate school, all students were required to take a course in logic. People had a vague understanding that there were also various other formal methods that used in philosophy – probability theory, decision theory, game theory, statistics – but courses in those topics did not fulfill the requirement, and students only rarely took them. At the time, this approach was widely regarded as a very reasonable one. Logic seemed to be more important to the discipline than all of these other formal methods put together.

But over the past decade or so, things have clearly changed. These days, philosophers are using all sorts of different formal methods. There are still lots of philosophers using logic, but it is no longer the case that logic eclipses all other formal methods.There are now tons of philosophers using probability theory (e.g., in formal epistemology), even more drawing on work that uses statistics (in everything from philosophy of mind to moral psychology to feminist philosophy), and a whole lot of other formal methods on the rise as well (causal Bayes nets, machine learning, Monte Carlo simulation).

Knobe's post was widely and favorably shared among my friends in social media (not a surprise because many of my professional friends are philosophers of science). As some of the commentators at Daily Nous and elsewhere have noted, quite a few departments (where formal philosophy or naturalistic projects have taken deep roots) have already advanced down some version of the path suggested by Knobe. Of course, in practice, graduate students that use formal methods in their own research and/or that engage with highly technical literature in the sciences (or math) may well need competencies that go far beyond the required courses in an average graduate curriculum (and may require considerable extra training outside philosophy in some sense). [I leave aside here, the very different organization of European PhD programs (these are increasingly pure research with no room for coursework).]

And, in principle, it is easy to get on board with Knobe's essay because he does not really explore the opportunity costs involved with a change in the curriculum. Economists love the idea of opportunity cost; philosophers less so. (Who told you that these possibilities are mutually exclusive; there is no logical/metaphysical reason for that...) But because a curriculum rations a scarce good (time/attention, etc.) it is a useful concept to deploy here. In Knobe's essay, he toys with the idea of displacing the logic requirement with a different requirement. In fact, he mentions quite a few departments that have changed the logic requirement into a formal methods requirement at both the undergraduate and graduate level. So, obviously, lots of peers are willing to go down this path.

Knobe does not mention, although it is clearly embedded in some of the examples he mentions, that in addition to fiddling around with the logic requirement, one can make room for more formal methods by abolishing (a) the language requirement or (b) the history requirement or (c) some kind of traditional distribution requirement (or some combination of these); that's clearly already happening in some of the formal philosophy departments. (I just checked the CMU program's curriculum, and it has gone down some version of this path. It also offers PhD degrees that are only very partially in philosophy.) I suspect that until China overtakes the USA politically and economically, the language requirement will be under pressure in philosophy departments (unless there are local reasons -- accreditation or divisional requirements, etc. -- to stick with it) Obviously, in very strong history or Continental-friendly departments language may be more secure.

I want to offer two further observations:

First, one consequence of removing logic from shared curriculum is to facilitate increasing specialization within and divergence among analytical philosophers. A notable side-effect of expecting increasing technical facility in whole parts of the discipline is that you cannot get an average graduate student to understand the issues in a field with one, maybe two graduate seminars. That is, previously professional philosophy was both capable of recruiting lots of smart people and simultaneously keeping barriers to enter any given philosophical conversation fairly low otherwise. (This also generated permissiveness toward the annoying tendency of boy wonders pontificating on any topic they put their intellectual spotlight on.) But Knobe's proposal and the evidence he provides for the curricular changes in the graduate curriculum provide some evidence for my claim from a few years ago, when I mused about the likelihood that there will be a divergence between formal philosophy and analytical philosophy.

And this second point gets me to voice a suspicion. It would be really cool if philosophers became much more sophisticated about the use of statistics or simulation software (etc.) and the evidential uses of statistics (simulation software, probability theory, etc.). But I think that not because I think philosophers should become equal partners in various non-trivial empirical/experimental research or teaching enterprises (in my political science department I teach works that have non-trivial statistical components). To be sure, I am all for folk striking out in that direction and to turn themselves into hybrid philosophers and empirical scientists (of the sort that Joshua Knobe exemplifies so nicely); but I really worry we would be losing something important, no supremely valuable, if we didn't try to keep training folk that can ask questions that are, in some sense, orthogonal to existing normal science, and I think the old logic requirement was, unintentionally, fertile ground for that within the larger philosophy curriculum.

On the Missing Footnotetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401b7c8fd1a4b970b2017-05-29T20:31:23+02:002017-05-29T21:19:18+02:00But there are sad celebrations as well, whose object is either to meet a calamity, or else merely to commemorate and deplore it. These rites have a special aspect, which we are going to attempt to characterize and explain. It is the more necessary to study them by themselves since...Eric Schliesser

But there are sad celebrations as well, whose object is either to meet a calamity, or else merely to commemorate and deplore it. These rites have a special aspect, which we are going to attempt to characterize and explain. It is the more necessary to study them by themselves since they are going to reveal a new aspect of the religious life to us.

We propose to call the ceremonies of this sort piacular. The term piaculum has the advantage that while it suggests the idea of expiation, it also has a much more extended signification. Every misfortune, everything of evil omen, everything that inspires sentiments of sorrow or fear necessitates a piaculum and is therefore called piacular. So this word seems to be very well adapted for designating the rites which are celebrated by those in a state of uneasiness or sadness.--E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Translated by J. Swain, p. 389.

A few weeks ago, in Oxford, I gave a talk at Blackwell's where they were running their usual 3 for the price of 2 sale on Oxford classic paperbacks. One of the discounted books I bought was Durkheim's Elementary Forms. At Chicago, as a graduate student, I knew plenty of PhD students in sociology, religion, anthropology, and social thought who had read Durkheim (for comps, etc.). But while I taught Comte and Weber, I never got around to study him seriously (although I am pretty sure I read him on suicide). Yesterday, I decided to try to read it.

As an aside, when I had more time or was younger (or both), I would happily read several books alongside each other. But nowadays, I prefer to focus on one book at a time. When I don't have an obligation to read a particular book (because of research, a deadline, some social reason, etc.), I find that I can aimlessly pick up a book, read a bit in it, and then put it down--this can be repeated several times with different books in a row; a book needs to grab me before I settle into it.

Yesterday, I started reading Durkheim's introduction: "...to study the most primitive and simple religion which is actually known, to make an analysis of it, and to attempt an explanation of it... in the first place, when it is found in a society whose organization is surpassed by no others in simplicity." This surprised me because Durkheim shows here, at once, his debt to eighteenth century Scottish social theory with its idea that societies develop from simple to complex, and that the simple societies can reveal something characteristic about the nature of a social practice. (The previous sentence simplifies the Scottish social theory methods, but let's leave that aside.) And while some of the Scots would have looked at Scottish Highlander culture or American Indians, Durkheim promises to draw on field work done among Australian aboriginals.

At that point -- I am still on Durkheim's first page --, I put the text down, and start looking for references to Hume, Ferguson, Millar, or Smith. I knew from Durkheim's other work (on the division of labor) that he was familiar with Adam Smith. In fact, when I first conceived my monograph, I had intended to compare Durkheim to Smith because, originally, my book was going to include a major reception history of Smith (up to Rawls and Foucault). But I came to recognize that executing this would be an excuse never to finish my monograph. Much to my surprise Durkheim does not mention any of the Scots in his religion book. (In fact, his explicit treatment of Smith is rather thin in the division of labor book, although I think Durkheim is quite indebted to Smith's social theory.)

Then I flipped to Durkheim's table of contents, and to my horror I noticed that one of the chapter titles is called: "Piacular Rites and the Ambiguity of the Notion of Sacredness." I then checked the French version on-line: Les rites piaculaires et l'ambiguïté de la notion du sacré with a footnote to Pliny. (I have traced Smith's use to Livy and the poet Lucan.) Durkheim does not mention Smith or The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), but he does mention another (once) famous book, Religion of the Semites, by another (nineteenth century) Scot, William Robertson Smith, which has a whole chapter on piacular sacrifice among the Ancient Hebrews. Robertson Smith's chapter mentions Lucian (Hume's and Smith's favorite author) en passant, but no Smith nor TMS. Now, I would be amazed if Robertson Smith was unfamiliar with Adam Smith's TMS, but that requires further research. I did find this gem, which ought to be the motto for us scholars, in William Robertson Smith:

Before I close, an autobiographical remark. Parts of my monograph can be traced back directly to my dissertation which I defended in 2002. But the dissertation did not hang together as a book, and I published a few chapters as papers and wrote a few occasion pieces inspired by my earlier research. When later, I moved to Europe, and entered the research grant environment, several grant reviewers complained that I did not have a monograph. (To make matters worse: I was being recruited for a prestigious chair, and then at the last minute was told that my lack of a monograph disqualified me.) While I was contemplating what I should write my book about, I read a draft of Ryan Hanley's terrific book on Adam Smith. Ryan and I had overlapped in graduate school (and one of my first publications was a criticism of one of his first papers), and I had edited one of his other papers. Even so his book was an eye-opener. After we left graduate school, Ryan had clearly re-read Smith with a fresh eye. And so, with a generous and much appreciated invitation from Brian Leiter (really!), I decided to re-read Smith and also work up a book on Smith for his series. This took me another seven years to produce. That is to say, when I turned in the final, corrected proofs, I had been researching Smith on-and-off for almost twenty years.

While I am pretty pleased with how my monograph turned out (except for the total lack of humor--I blame Adam Smith, who really was not funny), I am depressingly sure there are typos and ungrammatical sentences left in my monograph. It is what it is, I try to console myself. While I do not expect to do more original, scholarship on Adam Smith, I also know that my book won't be the last word on Smith (or public philosophy, the history of liberalism, etc.).

Then, last week, prompted by a very fine, draft paper by Maria Pia Paganelli and Michelle Bee, I wrote a blog post on material and insights that are only partially incorporated in the monograph. That post connects to the central argument of the book, and I am annoyed with myself for not discerning it more fully before I turned in the book. Even so, the vain scholar in me is even more annoyed for not catching the piacular connection between Smith and Durkheim; that would have made a fine note invisible to most readers, but impressive to the discerning.

The end of Liberalism; or the coming age of unreasonable views tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401bb099f3e0f970d2017-05-26T12:13:15+02:002017-05-26T12:59:50+02:00David Held and Pietro Maffettone collect essays exploring the global dimensions -- and arguing for the necessarily global character -- of contemporary political theorizing...In addition to the familiar topics of human rights and global distributive justice, it includes contributions on the legitimacy of international law and transnational political institutions; on...Eric Schliesser

David Held and Pietro Maffettone collect essays exploring the global dimensions -- and arguing for the necessarily global character -- of contemporary political theorizing...In addition to the familiar topics of human rights and global distributive justice, it includes contributions on the legitimacy of international law and transnational political institutions; on just war theory; and on a cluster of issues including territoriality, the global economy, and humans' relations to the natural environment and to future generations.

This integrated approach is welcome, and the book as a whole is a valuable resource for readers seeking to acquaint themselves with the state of the art in global political theory. The editors' introduction makes two agenda-setting points. First, they claim, political theory has reached a "cosmopolitan plateau," where acceptance of the equal moral status of all individuals (regardless of birthplace or location) defines the boundaries of reasonable disagreement in normative theorizing. Of course, different authors draw significantly different conclusions from the assumption of equal moral status; many theorists accept it without understanding themselves to be thereby committed to radically revisionist conclusions about global distributive justice or about the entitlements of states to control their own borders.--Emma Saunders-Hastings @NDPR Reviewing David Held and Pietro Maffettone (eds.), Global Political Theory, Polity, 2016.

In his 1992 paper, Pogge contrasts his concrete inspiration with the ways "politicians are speaking of a new world order." In historical context this is a nod to President Bush's first Gulf war to restore the border between Iraq and Kuwait and restore a (protected) sovereignty to Kuwait sanctioned by international law and global institutions. In that context, a new world order referred to American supremacy within the constraints of, and channeled by, international law and institutions. The complex entanglement of contemporary ethics with American hegemony (in the way Mill's or Green's thought was intertwined with imperial power) demands to be better understood and, I would argue, questioned (recall Khan on Singer). Be that as it may, Pogge's willingness to revisit borders is prescient, although as we've learned since, the actual process of redrawing of borders tends to be (a few notable exceptions granted) violent.

That there are many who wish to turn political theory (and international law) into a branch of a certain flavor of ethics is familiar enough. As it happens, this past year I have conducted three job searches in political theory (including comparative), and so have seen about (by a conservative estimate) 300 job dossiers of candidates with PhDs fairly recently minted in North America and Western Europe. The vast majority of these projects buy into some version of such moral egalitarianism and a good many apply it in the manner of GPT.

What I had not truly grasped before is that within GPT deviation from such cosmopolitan egalitarianism marks one as unreasonable (in the way predicted by Carl Schmitt). Again, I had naively assumed that being reasonable would consist in something like the disposition of treating disagreement even conflict with others by way of discussion in which reasons are (sincerely) offered, analyzed, and jointly evaluated. But in GPT to be reasonable means that one cannot enter the conversation unless one accepts certain moral commitments (in professional terms, a certain "consensus"). In their introduction, Held and Maffetono do not explain where such views about the boundary of legitimacy originate and who polices the boundary of who is let into the conversation (presumably that dirty job is farmed out to anonymous referees who -- like the marines -- do their work outside the scope of publicity).

One thing one learns from Thomas Kuhn (or George Stigler) is that where we find a professional consensus absent science, there are other forces that produce uniformity. In fact, Kuhn teaches that if one wants the appearance of intellectual progress one does well to create such uniformity of background commitments. The previous paragraph suggests, then, that the avalanche of work on GPT is the collective considered wisdom of our young scholars that the primary road to professional advancement and (for the more idealistic among them) improvement of humanity requires one to work within some version of GPT.

We know from history that intellectual mono-culture are great at problem-solving (and this can generate great creativity), but otherwise not very robust. They are incapable of adapting to changing circumstances and unable to confront, truly, the most urgent questions in which one must come to terms with arguments of the deviants from orthodoxy. (For this would require it to be self-critical about its own commitments.)+ So, a moment of reckoning is due. If history were ironic, then the professional triumph of GPT is also the moment it becomes obsolete.** After all, the political and democratic resurgence of views that reject versions of GPT's normative cosmopolitanism is the striking feature of our time. So, it is tempting to preach the end of liberal cosmopolitanism and become a prophet for a new order.

But history is probably not ironic. So, while some of us, outside the professional boundaries, search for alternative political theories, GPT may well continue to thrive even if the political conditions that gave rise to it, and that allow it to shape the political order, have long passed. After all, some of the greatest philosophical scholastics lived in the twentieth century and have enriched our intellectual universe.

*I mean this at an ethical level. Politically this is less so. It's only when you collapse these two that one fails to discern this.

+ Slavoj Žižek claims that "The Western legacy is effectively not just that of (post)colonial imperialist domination, but also that of the self-critical examination of the violence and exploitation the West itself brought to the Third World." (115) The example of GPT suggests that this examination falls short of trying to listen to what others might say if they are taken to be unreasonable.

**Some other time I'll say more about the proper intellectual response to this.

A Suggestion to Hypatia from a True Friend tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ee247e3883401bb0997523e970d2017-05-03T11:58:16+02:002017-05-04T11:08:01+02:00It is our position that the harms that have ensued from the publication of this article could and should have been prevented by a more effective review process. We are deeply troubled by this and are taking this opportunity to seriously reconsider our review policies and practices. While nothing can...Eric Schliesser

It is our position that the harms that have ensued from the publication of this article could and should have been prevented by a more effective review process. We are deeply troubled by this and are taking this opportunity to seriously reconsider our review policies and practices. While nothing can change the fact that the article was published, we are dedicated to doing what we can to make things right. Clearly, the article should not have been published, and we believe that the fault for this lies in the review process. In addition to the harms listed above imposed upon trans people and people of color, publishing the article risked exposing its author to heated critique that was both predictable and justifiable. A better review process would have both anticipated the criticisms that quickly followed the publication, and required that revisions be made to improve the argument in light of those criticisms.... We are a scholarly journal committed to an anonymous peer review process. We want readers to feel free to offer their honest feedback on manuscripts submitted to Hypatia. Anonymous peer review is important for the scholarly reputation of Hypatia; mistakes in particular instances should not compromise the commitment to anonymous peer review in scholarship.--"To our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy," Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors [HT Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir]

The details of the review process at Hypatia are described in the remainder of Associate Editors' statement. These do not live up to the discipline's very best practices (established recently) at Ergo, but -- if impartiality is our aim -- they are much better than how many purportedly 'top' (clubby) philosophy journals were being edited in recent memory (and some still are edited).

Even so, one need not be a student of psycho-analysis to note the anxious manner in which scholarly and anonymous peer review are being coupled in the statement. This confuses the process with the product. (In fact, there is a more general tendency among editors to farm out their judgment, procedurally, to overworked and under-appreciated referees, including the ridiculous practice of giving even transparently incompetent or biased referees de facto veto-power over the publication of a paper.) Anonymous peer review may be a means to being scholarly and other important ends, it is not itself an end (even if various journal ranking agencies, whose metrics subtly structure the incentives of so much of professional academic life, treat it as such). But in what follows, I accept, for the sake of argument, that anonymous peer review is a condition on being thought scholarly these days.

As the Hypatia debacle is unfolding, Neil Levy notes (on Facebook) that risk averse editors of many journals (an overworked and unappreciated lot) will be less likely to accept papers on trans issues and other issues that potentially attract controversy: if even Hypatia got it wrong, what chance do I have? Such editors will worry that they don't have the expertise to choose reviewers, let alone assess the papers themselves, and rather than risk time consuming and reputation shattering controversy will simply desk reject.+ Levy's observation is important because it reminds us that self-censorship in light of would be social or political controversy is always a live option in philosophy (I routinely discuss this as the Socratic Problem in philosophy).

Now, one response to Levy's worry is specialization and ever more fine-grained scholarly niche construction. Potentially controversial papers would only land at extremely specialized journals with the expertise to handle them. Now, while I think philosophy would have higher utility if a whole bunch of work on infanticide had been marginalized, such a strategy (hyper-specialization) would be undesirable; such specialization would reinforce marginalization of morally and politically important topics. It would also be self-defeating because it would push talent away into other disciplines and practices.

But there is another way to think about specialization here. Rather than specialization being driven by topic, it could be driven by expected fallout* (<-- sorry that sounded too much like an atom bomb) potential, public controversy. That is, some journals can foresee that the papers they publish have a higher than mere chance probability to touch a powerful nerve in scholarly disputes and be taken up in the public culture, public policy, and (alas) the culture wars. Hypatia is, in fact, some such a journal. It is pretty clear that its current review process is ill-suited to Hypatia's participation in would-be-public philosophy. (On what public philosophy might be, recall here.) No amount of tinkering will prevent future debacles. It does not follow it should become more risk averse nor does it follow it needs to give up anonymous review.**

For one can make the anonymous review process public and combine it with crowd-review. What I have in mind is not uncommon in journals devoted (not surprisingly) to climate science. (What follows is inspired by the practice of Earth Science Dynamics; take a look at the flow chart of its review process here. [HT Charlotte Werndl; Joel Katzav))*** Here's how it works. A paper is handled as it always is handled and sent out to referees. These then submit their honest feedback. After minor review by the editor (to check that the report is not abusive, does not remove confidentiality, etc.) the paper and the anonymous report are put up on the journal's website, where the author can respond to reviewer's objections, even re-submit the paper (with new reports, etc.), and where crowd-reviewers can participate on the paper (non-anonymously [in order to prevent the worst excesses familiar from the internet]). The exact details do not matter here. There are lots of ways to mix the process and many are pretty standard in various sciences. Luckily for Hypatia, it can draw on the expertise of a thriving and innovative community of feminist philosophers of science (some of whom sit on its various boards), many of whom have, in fact, scrutinized peer review practices ([see also this classic empirical paper by Wenneras &Wold] and recent work by Lee et al.)

As an aside, philosophy is a remarkably conservative and clubby professional discipline. (How clubby and boy-centric has long been known [recall here and here], but it has been now amply demonstrated in the Healy data and Weatherson's recent analysis.) This is especially problematic as it attempts to tackle issues that impinge on the lived experience(s) of just a few of its (ahh) gatekeepers.

What matters is that some such mixed referee process can (i) maintain anonymity of the main peer referees (and, thus, keep being thought scholarly), while simultaneously (ii) draw on a wider community of would be experts even interested/informed lay-people and (iii) alert the editors, authors, and referees to potential controversies that (this is important) one would wish to prevent. (The point is not to avoid controversy, but rather to be thoughtful and wise about them.) It also has the nice feature of (iv) creating interest in some of a journal's publications. And, it puts the responsibility of publication back where it belongs: the editor and her team. Of course, such a would-be-technocratic solution does not end political controversy. But it would internalize political considerations in a transparent and fruitful way in the review process and it would address the systematic nature of the problems (for useful comments of their systematicity see thus post @Feministphilosophers). Of course, such mixed review practices were not practical (time, cost, etc.) in the pre-internet days. But that's no excuse now.

+I should say that this post was prompted by a discussion with Lewis Michael Powell about journal practices generally. I hope he forgives me for stealing his thunder. But I trust he allows me to say that at any given time, there is plenty of thunder left in LMP.

***UPDATE: An earlier version of this post unfairly failed to acknowledge Katzav. I had, in fact, read (and commented on) an as of yet unpublished work by Katzav and Vaesen, 'Pluralism and peer review in philosophy,’ that offered a proposal along the lines suggested in this post.